Do Not Despise the Small Things

I just finished Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," which chronicles a year in her and her family's life of eating locally by growing most of their own food, sourcing other things as locally as possible, and learning to live without everything else. Suffice it to say, they made it through the year with aplomb and discovered that this way of living had become the new normal; there was no going back. Kingsolver concludes with a quote that really struck me. On p. 346 of the book, she writes:

It's the worst of bad manners--and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society--to ridicule the small gesture. These earnest efforts might just get us past the train-wreck of the daily news, or the anguish of standing behind a child, looking with her at the road ahead, searching out redemption where we can find it: recycling or carpooling or growing a garden or saving a species or something. Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.

So much of what our society values involves the big gestures: asking someone to marry you on the Jumbotron at a ballpark, winning American Idol, "royal hunting," celebrity tabloids and notoriety, getting onto Oprah (that that's defunct for now). Even philanthropy has to be big: the Gates Foundation with their billions of dollars or the 10 year plan to end homelessness in King County; these are the things that matter. Donating $10 each month to your local charity pales in comparison. There isn't a lot of respect for the small things. But when it comes down to it, the question, as Kingsolver puts it, is "How do you encourage people to keep their hope but not their complacency?" And in this case, as with many things, it's not despising the small things in order to keep hope alive: grow some herbs or a kitchen garden, carpool or ride the bus once or twice a week, buy organic if possible, visit the local farmer's market, say "hi" to your neighbor, walk up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, turn off the TV during dinner. It doesn't seem like much but as Helen Keller puts it:

The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker.